>>32674462I loved SM. I'm not going to call them flawless. They weren't. There were a lot of flaws, but three of them were big enough to affect every playthough.
Encounter rates, for one. They were fucked up beyond belief. There were more Wingull in Alola than all Alolan Pokemon combined.
Second was the size. Even someone like me, who really loved the atmosphere and look of the region, and loved how it was designed, was disappointed with the size. It was too small. Especially the caves that aren't on Poni Island. They were just too small to even be called caves.
Third was the lack of a skip button. This was not a problem for me personally, as I have enjoyed the cutscenes even after 3 playthroughs, but I can easily imagine someone who just wants to play being annoyed by the large amount of cutscenes in the beginning and the end.
Besides these three, SM were great. There were a few minor things too, like the replacement of PSS with Plaza, but they aren't big enough to matter. Plaza is more inconvenient if you want to play online, but it also has a lot of helpful features at higher level than PSS did. And even though it is inferior to PSS in a few areas, but it is still better than anything that wasn't PSS, so better than the vast majority of Pokemon games. Thus, I would say these things aren't going to negatively affect any playthrough enough to matter.
Out of the big flaws, the only one that mattered to me was the first one. The encounter rates. As I mentioned earlier, I liked the region and did not need a skip button for cutscenes. On the other hand, SM introduced and updated many things to the point I would absolutely love them, including but not limited to Alolan forms, Pelago, difficulty, story and characters, trials and totem Pokemon, Z-move, Poke Ride, Refresh and so on.
So overall, I loved SM. Tied with BW2 as my favorite games in the series. So, I disagree with you. They were not the worst.
